The downside of this is that searching your own search history is not as useful.
I use DDG as my primary search provider (and have now for years) it works quite well, has bang searches, and just added date-based search filtering, my most-wanted feature.
I avoid use of Google products where logged in, generally, simply because getting social nags etcetera when doing other shit is annoying as fuck. Plus bubbling and filtering.
There are still Google tools I use. Scholar, Books (though Worldcat is better for general "who published stuff), and NGram Viewer.
Otherwise, I've been sliding from Google services for quite a while.
> search results biased by my previous queries
would that have to be a bad thing? I understand it prioritises search results near you area, or remembers things like whether you're more into the country or the animal when you search for [turkey].
I think concerns about the online filter bubble can be a bit overblown. We have the same thing in real life too: e.g. I like to hang out with people who share my world view rather than seek out those with opposing views.
Well I would like to research the arguments from both sides in order to form an informative opinion. If my search engine does not give me that but instead shows me only results I would agree with initially on the top, what's the point of using a search engine in the first place?
That's an example of a well-known cognitive bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Being biased is not a good thing if you care about knowing what is true and what isn't.
As an example, someone who is into astrology will have less opportunities to learn that it's all bullshit if Google continues to do this disservice to people.
With years, we grow intellectually. When I was about 13 or 14, I was interested in astrology too. It would be stupid if those idiotic years would still haunt me in my google searches.
Basically only thing I've left is the YouTube history and search. Sadly the YouTube history is a bit useless since you can't search through it.
Worth noting: you need to disable that even if you're logged out because shadow profiles are enabled by default.
Also worth noting: even if you have a completely clean Google history like I do (which is a pain in the ass because you have to delete the data for every single day one by one), they keep the data for six months, so if you turn on the personalized crap in less than six months, they'll already have some data available to personalize your content right away.
I tried turning it on for a month just to see if I'm missing something by having their personalized crap turned off, but nope. Their services were even more useful and kind of creepy in whole different ways (for example, when I join the new WiFi network and open up YouTube, it's going to recommend me videos that Google tracked that people watched from that IP. Checked it a couple of times because I couldn't believe that they would do that.)